A Goa Made in India

I thought that it would make sense for me to add a link to Rajdeep Sardesai's essay titled 'A Goa Made in India' that I refer to in the earlier post, some of which points I address as well.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=41515f67-7fc9-495f-ac9f-63c9f800fc30&MatchID1=4664&TeamID1=5&TeamID2=2&MatchType1=1&SeriesID1=1173&MatchID2=4673&TeamID3=4&TeamID4=8&MatchType2=1&SeriesID2=1177&PrimaryID=4664&Headline=A+Goa+made+in+India

Of Rapes, Murder and Drugs and the ‘Real Goa’

A week or so ago, in the face of the storm that sought to blow the Scarlett Keeling incident totally out of proportion and paint Goa as a sleazy drug den, Maria Aurora Couto pointed out on NDTV’s ‘We the People’ debate that the Goa where this event transpired, was not “her Goa”. Around the same time, Rajdeep Sardesai pointed out in his essay in the Hindustan Times that “The Goa of a tiny strip of beach between Candolim and Anjuna is constantly in the media gaze and makes front page headlines. The vast majority of Goans who live outside this world are rarely documented because their lives seem much too unexciting to be explored.” This Goa, ‘our Goa’ as they would like to represent it to us, and have the media focus on is a Goa of “deep social conservatism, of folk religiosity in its village temples and churches, of simplicity of lifestyle within rural communities, of a premium on education and of immense pride in its plural, multi-cultural heritage”.

Point well made you guys, since there is a need to strike back at the deliberately created image of Goa as a destination of sun, surf, sex and sand. And yet, there is much to be feared as well, in this move to shift focus away from the perverted gaze of the tourist and Indian media industry. When we claim that the real Goa lies in her villages, and not on the beach belt, what we are also doing is denying any claim to authenticity of the Goans who actually live and work in the beach belt. Participants to the sub-culture that has emerged in the beach-belt, these are Goans too, and thus the sub-culture on the beach belt, is genuinely Goan culture as well. To say this however, is not to say that we must turn a blind eye to the illegal trade in drugs that has filled the scene there, merely because a few Goans make a living (killing?) out of it. On the contrary, it is quite clear that there is a need for regulation in this area. The point I seek to make however, is that the argument regarding the ‘real Goa’ that seeks to deny the existence of the sub-culture of the beach belt is located in a definite class and caste location. A position which if not monitored consciously could see us unconsciously laying the ground for a rightist takeover of the Goan space.

When Sardesai says that Goa is a place of ‘deep social conservatism’, is he justifying this setup as idyllic? Dare we contemplate that for a good many Goans, who were and are at the wrong end of the stick, this ‘conservatism’ leads not to gentility but the suffocation of social and economic opportunity? A good many Goans who buy this argument of the ‘real Goa’ hark back to the days when Anjuna was a quite little village, when everything and everybody went to sleep by 8 in the evening, when decent norms were observed. But whose Goa and Anjuna was this, whose order was it that was maintained in villages such as Anjuna? The answer is best provided in the words of a landlord from Anjuna, who proclaimed with certitude, “this would not have happened if we were still in Anjuna”. And for sure it would not have happened, since all the little fisherfolk and peasants of the village would have been firmly under you thumb my friend! Tourism, for all its evils (and there are some) also provided a way out of enforced and oftentimes suffocating codes, it provided a way out of the lifestyles that were simple not necessarily out of choice, but because of the poverty of the Goan village (that it was nothing compared to the worst case of poverty in India is not an argument does not draw from the experience of poverty).

Already following the moral hoo-ha in the course of the Keeling incident there have been efforts to suggest the imposition of an end to rave-parties, a firm stop to the nigh-life post 11 in the evening. And of course, because such events are not in keeping with ‘Goan’ culture, it finds legitimacy, no bother that it is going to impact on the livelihoods of local Goans, who may not necessarily be engaged in drug or sex trade. The morality argument in effect serves two rightist interests. It allows Goa’s upper class and upper caste to gain the respect of India, based on middle-class values of respectability and the appeal to caste brotherhood, and it serves the interests of the underground drug trade. Create an environment where drug consumption is totally banned, and what you have, as is the case now, is a space wide open, for the police to cooperate with the drug lords.

What was remarkable about the NDTV debate was the total absence of the lower caste and class Goan. Think closely and you will realise how their image of Goa almost never has space in the official representation of Goa. The only lower class person on the NDTV debate was Fiona MacKeown, and we saw just how exactly her status was used in the debate- and elsewhere- against her. A telling example maybe?

(Published in the Gomantak Times, 26 March 2008)

Upper-caste Catholics and the dream of the Hindu Right

In the flush following the Festival of Ideas, the moderator of an egroup of research scholars on Goa was inspired to cry out “Why don’t we dedicate the group to Abbé Faria and D.D. Kosambi, we could then have one for each community!” Responding to this idea, a friend blinked his eyes and inquired; “Two communities?” He paused, scratched his head and asked again “Two communities? How two communities? Aren’t they both Saraswat?” This had not been my own response; my own had been to fume and remark on the manner in which the Goan Muslim had once more been written out of the equation. My friend’s response though scored higher on two counts, not only did he manage to humourously ridicule this suggestion (as it should have been) but the man had also hit the nail on the head and unlocked in an instant the key to understanding the emergence of communal tensions in our fair (?) land.

Its been going on for sometime, but since the past few years one hears a number of Catholic Brahmins stand up to proclaim their Saraswat status. To be proud that they were (are?) Brahmin we can argue is as old as the sun, but to see themselves as Saraswat is a relatively new phenomenon. It is this fact, and the fact that Chardos can claim to have a Maratha heritage that will ensure that there will be no major confrontation between the two major religious groups in Goa. This does not translate to the fact that there will be communal harmony however. It is clear, especially in light of the recent clamour that there be a ban on cow slaughter in Goa, that the Hindu right will persist in stirring up trouble. However there may be a management of the tension through the alliance that is brought about through the identification of the Catholic upper-caste groups with their Hindu upper-caste brethren. It may not be openly acknowledged, but these two upper caste groups have time and again collaborated to ensure that the status-quo is maintained, the easiest example being the manner in which the Konkani agitation was managed. Upper caste Catholic and Saraswat combine to create the (Konkani) terms for their dominance. And since it was upper caste interests and alliances that were focused on, it is no surprise that where Konkani was concerned, the lower caste Catholic was sold out and deliberately left with no real linguistic option. The implications for communal strife through Catholic upper-caste identification with Hindu upper-castes is more in evidence in Mangalore. Most Mangalorean Catholics are so eager to pass themselves off as upper-caste, that they have in recent years produced Brahmin identities for themselves, and sharpened their weddings with Brahmanical rituals. The result is that whenever there is communal strife in the area, they are able to persuade themselves that it is a Muslim problem and lie low; play the Christian cheek as it were. That this strategy does not work for long can be seen by the fact that not too long ago was the attack on a group of Catholic religious, where one of them literally had his teeth pushed in. Quite clearly then, the assertion of an upper-caste identity by non-Hindu groups works only to ensure a management of communal tension, as these groups work hand-in-hand to keep the lower castes in check, until they realize that the communal situation has blown up in their collective faces!

Goa may not see Catholic-Hindu riots but it has and will continue to see unprovoked attacks on Muslims, because the upper-caste Catholic, who is in control of Church and community has internalized Hindu nationalist logic about the Muslim. As such, rather than realizing that they stand to gain should they identify with a minority group that is being punished for not being Hindu upper-caste, they join in the persecution of the Muslim. Another reason for the persecution is the Goan Catholics’ own insecurity about their status and future in the state. It is a fact of history that rather than stand together against a common bully, the weak fight among themselves. The anti-Muslim feeling in Goa should really be put down to this, the weak fighting the weak, one set of dominant groups stoking the fire and the other playing ostrich trying to blend in. It didn’t help the assimilated Jews in Europe, why would it help us?

(In commemoration of the communal violence perpetrated in Curchorem-Sanvordem 2006)

Published in the Gomantak Times 5th March 2008

Contemplating the Festival of Ideas

Of the many wonderful things that the D. D. Kosambi Festival of Ideas did, surely the demonstration of the size of the audience consistently present through all four days of the festival should be the most wonderful. Given the lively nature of debates in Goan society; and the experience of earlier lectures, such as that of the disappointing lecture by the authors of the book on Mao, where the Black box was filled to capacity; the size of the Festival audience should not have come as a surprise. And yet, the magnitude was overwhelming, demonstrating perhaps once and for all that there exists a mature audience in Goa for matters intellectual, and that the representations of the Goan as intellectually disinterested are frankly dishonest. For our reigning Chief Minister who has tried at every possible event to make the right noises this should be a signal. Stop planning film festivals on nationalism (it went out of intellectual fashion light years ago), promising to spruce up samadhis (cater to the living not to the dead); all you need to do is provide a budget that will get prominent minds to Goa for but a day, deliver a fantastic lecture, interact with the audience and leave behind a State where the quality of internal dialogue has substantially improved.

There can be no doubt that the Festival contributed to dialogues within Goan society. You had only to be witness to the charged Question and Answer sessions following every lecture to see how that dialogue was being initiated. I don’t think we acknowledge how strong the right wing is in Goa and these sessions demonstrated not only the breadth of their existence but also their courage. And it wasn’t only members of the cultural right, the Hindutva brigade who stood up to defend their positions, these sessions also allowed us to be witness to members of fledgling political stand up to make their fascist points about Indians (and Goans) being unfit for democracy. At times the speakers did not grasp the nuances of Goan politics to give effective answers, but in the case of the cultural right, it was a particular pleasure to see Romila Thapar demolish cherished rightist positions by piling fact on fact and demonstrate the factual inconsistencies of Hindutva rhetoric. In an era when the State is rolling back its services in favour of the poor and the marginal and asserting its power in favour of the rich and the unaccountable, it was thrilling to see the most unabashed critique of the State and defense of distributional justice take place under the benevolent shadow of the umbrella of the State. For those who were listening, the talks at the festival and the interactions that followed clearly laid out an agenda for us in Goa, an agenda that requires us to recommit to the politics of distributional justice and a agenda that takes head-on the forces of the Hindu (and other) Right.

If these and other dialogues are to continue then it seems necessary that Goa continue to be witness to more such public lectures. If these public lectures continued to be organized in the name of the State, but safely conceptualized by persons with definite capability there would be nothing like it. Ofcourse a State celebration comes with its limitations, for example what exactly were all those flowers and thermocol cutouts doing on the curtain behind the speaker? And the appearance of a table full of ‘eminent personages’ from behind a curtain? Thank goodness for the sterling speakers else the whole festival would have quite literally turned into what the stage setting promised- some mediocre village feast! And was there really need for an MC, a Chair who did not fulfill the role normally assumed by a chair, the person delivering a vote of thanks et al on stage? What we had at the festival was State aesthetic at its finest and the contrast with the intellectual material that was on offer couldn’t be starker. The organizers of the festival apparently decided against calling it a lecture series because they wanted to attract an audience with a sexy title. Since they recognize that style counts, perhaps they could have also reviewed the style quotient in the setting for the lectures. A stage trimmed of floral, synthetic and bureaucratic excess, one Chair who got straight to the point and the speaker for the evening, this would have been ideal. But I guess you can’t win all battles at one go, and we still have more festivals to go before we sleep. Thank you Digu maam for the festival, may you support more such ventures…

(Published in the Gomantak Times, 21 February 2008)

The Muslim and the Catholic in Goa and India

This column is being written from Delhi where I have just completed a tour of North India with a bunch of Americans. It was while on this trip that I realised, with a fair amount of horror, the extent to which the Indian national identity is built on the idea of the image of an all-encompassing gentle Hinduism and an evil and barbaric Muslim. Despite the overwhelming Persian influence on this region, brought by the Islamic Turko-Afghans, at almost every site the tour guides stressed a ‘Hindu’ linkage where the Muslim emerged only as a destroyer of the wonder that was India. More often than not these stories twisted facts around to emerge with the Muslim as the villain of the piece.

Visibly agitated, I was asked the question if whether having a Muslim guide would have given us a different perspective. Thinking through this question I realized with sinking heart that this would not be a solution, since the nationalist narrative has effectively worked out the space for the Muslim. There is the good Muslim as represented by Akbar who is supposed to have Hinduised himself, and the bad Muslim represented by Aurangzeb who apparently violently asserted an Islamic identity over a syncretic option open to him. Whether they actually were or were not as this history represents them to be, is not really a choice open to the common man: we have to accept them as such, and then either praise or vilify the appropriate Emperor.

Arriving in Delhi this realization was further affirmed when I flipped through the brochure of a prominent centre for Islam in India. The Centre continues within a tradition that understands ‘Indo’ as code for Hindu, accepts the proposition that Islam is from outside and can never truly be internal(ised) but asserts at the same time that one can be a good Indian Muslim. This assertion, it should be pointed out, works for a particular class of Indian Muslims—the upper class/caste—who stress their foreign origins, and derive social distinction vis-à-vis the lower caste Indian Muslims from it. Further, their emphasis on clarifying the “true” meaning of Islam creates a space where their access to the text is privileged. This emphasis on the text of Islam, rather than the happy soup of lived practice inspired by the message of Islam, in fact creates the necessary background for fundamentalist Islam. In sum this acknowledgement confirms their place as leaders and representatives of Indian Islam and denies any space for lower class/caste Muslims to stress their vision of what it means to be Islam, a vision that could possibly escape the fundamentalist readings of what it means to be a Muslim.

In Goa, the Muslim shares a similar fate. There is a similar celebration of Hindu nationalist myths with the Muslim either erased or cast as the bad guy. The celebration of Indo-Portuguese art is a good example. The term Indo-Portuguese in fact operates as code for Hindu-Catholic and celebrates their union. The term leaves no space for the influence of the Islamicate in Goa, which though plentiful is expelled. The celebration of Indo-Portuguese art therefore casts the Muslim as the eternal outsider to Goa, while creating Goa as the legitimate space for the Catholic and the Hindu. This equation operates for only a certain kind of Catholic though, the upper-caste Catholic. The upper-caste Catholics are able to link up with the Hindu imagination for the nation through stressing their Brahmin, Kshatriya backgrounds. At the same time a textual interpretation of the religion stresses their distinction from the lower-caste Catholic masses. Both ways it leaves the lower class/caste Catholic without an option. It delegitimizes the easy mix of local and Catholic belief that marks Goan Catholicism and also leaves a lower-caste Catholic with no way to link up with a nation that is imagined primarily in upper-caste terms and pride in racial origin.

For years now the Muslim problem in India has been imagined as precisely that: as a problem of and by Muslims. Increasingly though we are coming to realize that this problem is the result of the history of Hindu nationalism and impacts equally on all communities that are not Hindu and upper-caste, or do not share in this exclusivist vision accepting a subordinate role within the narrative. In Goa our belly-gazing has still not allowed us to realize what exactly is going on, but for those who are willing to see, the writing on the wall is pretty clear!

(This essay is dedicated to Khaled Anis Ansari thanks to discussions with who I have been able to view the Indian Muslim community from a radically new perspective, which has allowed me to relook the Goan Catholic community as well.)

(Published as "A Celebration of Nationalist Myths" in the Gomantak Times, 30 January 2008)

Economic History and the Independent Goan

Last fortnight this column made a plea for a serious attempt at constructing an economic history of Goa; a history that takes as its starting point the recognition of Goa’s late entry into global capitalism. Responding to the argument a friend pointed out that it was not enough to point out that the local capitalist was also a possible loser as Goa was forcibly prized open as a market for India and the world. It was necessary to also look at role the local bourgeoisie will play when the ‘victims of history’ try to ‘compel’ the State into actions that would secure their interests. What would their stand be and for what reasons? Would their class interest be in keeping British-Indian bourgeoisie and global capital out, creating a protected enclave for themselves, or will they continue to play second fiddle to these forces? Common sense would instantly suggest that local capitalists would choose the latter option, and yet I believe that a detailed and researched answer may possibly yield a more complex reality of the manner in which local capitalists operate. This reflection would also open out options open to us for strategic association to stem the neo-colonial practices that current developmental solutions in fact represent.

Right now though I would like to ignore the local capitalist and focus on the manner in which Goan identity emerges through its historical location. The Goan it is believed, by both local and external capitalist, is an unreliable worker. They are lazy, soçegad and disappear at festivals since they loving partying. An earlier approach I adopted to moving past this obviously negative portrayal of the Goan was to locate this representation in the politics of post-colonial India. The British saw the Portuguese in exactly the same terms, since the Portuguese were great miscegenators the Goan was also tarred with the same brush, and the British Indian inherits this way of looking at Goa. Economic history however would also allow us another, not particularly divergent reading of this scenario. Understood theoretically capitalism emerges to release labour from the holds of such social structures as feudalism. In releasing labour though, it provides its own punishing way of encapsulating them once again. Historically capitalism has emerged through the dispossession and impoverishment of labour, a perfect example being the depopulation of the English countryside to create the urban industrial hubs of the Industrial Revolution. Capitalism thrives and sustains itself on the insecure and impoverished worker. It is only in this condition that it can effectively sustain itself, when faced with the worker ensconced in a variety of social relationships and capable of sustaining oneself outside of the industrial economy the capitalist machine falters.

Goans will never tire of indicating that in the Portuguese days there was no poverty. This of course is a myth; it was poverty that forced the migration of Goans into the broader world. But while there was poverty, there was also a relationship to society and land that allowed for basis sustenance and survival. It is this security of the Goan labourer who refuses to be pulled out of the comfort of the social and ecological safety nets that the capitalist cannot deal with or understand. We have to recognize then, that the project of the industrialization of Goa – as so tenderly forwarded by our Governor- demands the necessary destruction of social and ecological security of Goa. These are not necessarily conscious evil plans, but the necessary logic by which capitalism must reproduce itself. At the end of the day the supposedly lazy and unmotivated Goan turns out to be the smart cookie who engages with industrial employment on her own terms. She uses it to supplement an existing income and provide forms of temporary escape from the embrace of existing social networks that also need to be challenged. The capitalist system ofcourse cannot deal with such independent actions, predicated as it is on predictability, which is why it is the Goan’s choices that must be castigated.

Slowly but surely voices are emerging that are sounding the call for a rethink on the developmental policies of the State. These calls and voices are not anti-developmental since we are all obviously imbricated in the fabric of the global economy. These calls represent demands for a more democratic method of planning, a method of planning that respects local cycles and independence, and that is insistent that existent wealth must not be cast away merely to suit the demands of blinkered bureaucrats.

(Published in the Gomantak Times 17th January 2008)

Economic History and the future of Goa

While there have been many attempts to write a social and cultural history of Goa- histories that either stress or refuse the difference with British-India (the territory that often passes off under the name of India), there has not as yet been any serious attempt to write an economic history of the territory of Goa. This history, if it is to capture the nuances of Goa, would have to stress difference, rather than stressing the economic condition of colonization and the sad tired stories of bleeding the territory dry. Of course, this difference is not to paint the colonizers as the good guys, since they may come out looking just as bad. Difference would have to be stressed in this history to draw attention to the differential manner in which Goa financially integrated into the Indian nation-state.

The primary difference that marks the economic history of Goa is its late entry into industrial capitalism, very much like its colonizer Portugal. Goa entered industrial capitalism only in the 1950s with the opening of the mines, a particularly degrading industry that can be held responsible both for the ecological wasting away of its society, as well as its deliberate intellectual retardation. What were the mechanisms of making it big before this? One either was a member of the small aristocracia de coco,aristocracies dependent on returns from agricultural surplus, primarily coconuts; or one traded in opium or slaves and built the capital for other ventures; or one migrated, got on to the ships, worked one’s fingers off, sent money back and erected the homes that mimicked the grand style of the ‘aristocrats’. It appears that of these various types, it was really those involved in the illicit opium and slave trade of the days who were able to make the fortunes that would allow them to seize the opportunity to swing into industrial capitalism when the opportunity first presented itself.

It is not as if British-India did pass through a similar trajectory. It did also have similar groups, and yet its early entry into industrial capitalism, the nature of its comprador class and the sheer necessity to survive created a class that was built to a large extent also on the selling-off of land to obtain freely tradeable capital. This process of the privatization of land saw the impoverishment that one associates with British-India, a process that was by and large absent in Goa, allowing the Goan poor (and there were lots of them) to live off the common resources and fend off starvation at the very least. What we witness today, in the large-scale sale of land in Goa, is partially the attempt of those Goans who did not make the boat in the 1950s to create enough capital to get into the capitalist game, and survive in the contemporary world, clearly titled in favour of private resources and tradeable income. The tragedy is that for most of them, it is way too late, industrial capitalism has given way to globalized capitalism, which the British-Indians have managed, via their colonial history, to be a part of. It is not just the peasant, clerk and professional that this history impinges on, but also the local entrepreneur and small capitalist, a fact that was recently made obvious to me when a member of the GCCI complained that the DSIDC would prefer to cater to the larger capitalist from British-India than the small Goan fry.

In the highly charged debate that is rightly concerned with what is going to happen to our state, all too often the implications of our economic history is not taken into account. Goans remained by and large therefore tied to this heritage of a late entry into industrial capitalism. As such the problem Goa faces is not necessarily the migrant labour but the British-Indian capitalist who makes pawns of the migrants, the Goan peasants and working class. They do this of course, not consciously, since they are really playing out – to put it vulgarly- their class-determined historical role. The local State, though, can still be captured by these victims of history, and the State of Goa compelled to play a role that recognizes the peculiar vulnerability of residents of the State, and put in place an economic system geared towards them rather than the depradations of the British-Indian and global capitalist, both of who continue to play the role of a colonizer as they play the local market for labour and land. To not recognize this historical difference will be to doom the majority of the residents of Goa into the poverty that has and will continue to mark India, with a slim majority joining the ranks of the global capitalist.

(Published in the Gomantak Times 4th Jan 2008)